Letter: Pro-gun bias?

Why did The Recorder’s editors even bother with the rhetorical question that headed the egregiously one-sided “journalistic” article at the top of the 12/22 front page: “Are Our Gun Laws Enough?”

On the top right, the editors granted the tediously-predictable NRA a bully pulpit to espouse the ludicrous idea that armed “good guys” in every school (paid for by whom? trained by whom?) would prevent another Newtown-style massacre; at the top left, the main article quotes a series of solid local citizen gun-owners who are pretty sure that locking up one’s guns is all it takes and that “bad guys” will obtain assault rifles with 30-round magazines “regardless of the law.”

Case closed, apparently. Except that no one holds a candlelight vigil for the first-grader who shoots his four year old sister with daddy’s “safely locked” weapon or the distraught teenager who commits suicide with mommy’s protector of her personal freedoms. Every year in this staggeringly violent country, guns slaughter forty classrooms worth of children — homicide, “accidents” and suicide — overwhelmingly the guns owned by their parents. If you own a gun and keep it in your home, its statistically most-likely victim will be someone who lives in your home.

What “freedom” are you protecting, exactly? Whatever hellish psychosis Adam Lanza had descended into, it found expression in the horrifying murder of children precisely because gun-culture and its perverse preoccupations were completely normative in his home, as they are in the homes of millions of other disturbed, traumatized and angry young men, as they inescapably are in our media and in our collective, locked-and-loaded mentality.